Petoskey's Keith Sterly has come a long way in a year

You look at Keith Sterly and you see a 6-foot-6, 310-pound mountain. Good kid, good work ethic, solid family from a good high school Up North, and a state champion wrestler.

No wonder college football coaches were salivating over the 2004 Petoskey High School graduate, who anchored both the offensive and defensive lines in three years of varsity football, won a state wrestling title, and was a solid contributor on the track and field team at PHS.

He accepted a scholarship to play football at Northern Michigan University. Last August, almost a year ago to the day, Sterly went to Marquette to begin in his college football career. Good kid, bright future, getting a chance to do what most kids only dream about: Play sports in college, and receive a scholarship for it.

Within a few days, he was back in Petoskey.

You look at Sterly, all 6-6 and 310 with very little fat on his body, and you see a body capable of plowing over virtually any opponent on the football field, of turning good-sized kids into pretzels on the wrestling mat, of tossing a shot put like it's a baseball.

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You look beyond the body, and you see a kid, a kid who did not turn 17 until two days after his final high school football game.

And a kid, still two-plus months shy of 18, leaving a close-knit family, a longtime girlfriend, friends and coaches he's known for years, to play college football.

The first day of practice in college football for an incoming freshman can be something akin to boot camp. It didn't take Sterly more than a day or two to realize he was out of his element.

At a crossroads one year ago, he drove away from Marquette and back home to Petoskey. He may not have known it at the time, but he was starting on the long road to finding himself.

Playing with pain

Sterly suffered a back injury near the end of his sophomore football season in high school, and it nagged him for the rest of his days in a Northmen uniform.

"For two years, I had constant pain in my leg and lower back," he says, running his massive hands down his right thigh.

It would not be until after he left NMU a year ago that doctors diagnosed the source of the pain, a ruptured disc.

He played over it, managed it, in high school. Grit your teeth, buckle down, and, to be honest, simply bull through opponents on the football field and on the wrestling mat who often were smaller, physically weaker, less athletic.

As a football player, he was the anchor of both the offensive and defensive lines throughout his three-year varsity career. On the wrestling mat, Sterly simply became one of the very best to ever come through Petoskey, winning a state 275-pound title as a senior in 2004 after finishing as the state runner-up the year before.

Sterly amassed a 142-29 record, including a shining 102-5 mark over his final two years. In his senior season, he set school records for victories (54) and pins (41).

At NMU, Sterly was thrust into a pool with athletes as big (or bigger) and as strong (or stronger) and, in some cases, as much as five and six years older.

It was one part physical, one part emotional. He was a long way from home and all alone, and that perhaps made the pain in his back all the more excruciating.

"I practiced for a day and I couldn't get out of bed the next morning," Sterly says. "It just killed me.

"I was up there by myself, I mean, I had football, but I had none of my friends …"

Coming home

Back in Petoskey, Sterly had to face the music. He went before his old high school football coaches, specifically head coach Kerry VanOrman and assistant Chris Schmoke, who himself had played four years of football at NMU.

"I admit it, I wasn't mature enough," Sterly says, unwinding on a couch inside Petoskey High School wrestling coach Ray Arthur's office which is adjacent to the school's state-of-the-art wrestling room. "My dad even says I've grown up a lot in the last year."

From last August until the spring, 2005, Sterly rested his back, took a few classes at North Central Michigan College, worked as an oil-change mechanic at a car dealership, and worked in the family business - logging.

When the subject of that kind of work is brought up, Sterly smiles and slowly shakes his head. His back problems are behind him, and he doesn't want to have to depend on that back, no matter how massive it is, to make a living.

"When you have to wear chaps that'll stop a chainsaw …" he says. "I don't want to do back-breaking work the rest of my life."

He also walked back into the Petoskey High School wrestling room - now as an alum, and one of just three from the school to have ever won an individual state title - and went back to work.

He practiced with the Northmen wrestling team and sparred with his replacement at 275 pounds, Josh Zoerhof. The two continue to work out together, along with other current, future and past Northmen wrestlers, thrice weekly under the watchful eye of longtime Petoskey High School coach Ray Arthur.